Dense, full of obscure references and anchored to a plot without much narrative, "In Praise of Love" is a film that has unusual expectations from its audience -- and that's a welcome relief.

Godard, one of the greatest names in the history of cinema, has made a movie that channels his feelings about Hollywood, American commercialism, the difficulties of making a movie (one of the characters is a filmmaker), the stages of love, Paris and history. Strictly on a visual level, "In Praise of Love" is a masterwork. The first half, which follows a director as he tries to cast a film, was shot in fine-grain black-and-white 35mm film. The movie's second half, which is a flashback to an earlier time, was shot in saturated color digital video.

The filmmaker in "In Praise of Love" is unsure of himself. He plans to make a movie about three couples and the different levels of a love affair, then questions whether his project should be a film, a novel, a play or even an opera. He walks around Paris and has intense discussions with friends. In an example of the realism that Godard imposes on "In Praise of Love," one scene shows the filmmaker as he talks in a phone booth, his voice occasionally drowned out by the traffic whizzing by. The scene adds to the intense, challenging feeling of the film's first half.

The movie's second half is more accessible, but it's there that Godard's anger is most visible. An old French couple in Brittany who fought in the Resistance is trying to avoid foreclosure on their property, and they're reluctantly selling their story to slick, vapid representatives of an American company called Spielberg Associates and Inc.

"The Americans have no real past," a character complains. "They have no memory of their own. They buy the pasts of other people and sell images."

Many U.S. critics have scolded Godard for his anti-U.S. tone, but he's certainly not the only artist who has that view. Give Godard and this film a chance before judging it. Though it may be a letdown for moviegoers who are married to the Godard of the '60s, when he made narrative films like "Breathless" and "Contempt," "In Praise of Love" shows that Godard is alive and well -- a filmmaker who continues to probe issues and stories that deserve our attention.

In "Das Experiment," Moritz Bleibtreu ("Run Lola Run") is a taxi driver and journalist who goes undercover to participate in a psychological research project, which puts 20 men in a mock jail and divides them into prisoners and guards.

Tempers flare, fights break out and chaos ensues -- even though they are paid good money to be human guinea pigs on a project where violence theoretically isn't tolerated. A disturbing film that forces moviegoers to ask,

"What would I do in a similar situation?," "Das Experiment" is based on Mario Giordano's novel "Black Box," which was inspired by the "Stanford Prison Experiment" of 1971.

The Stanford experiment was halted after six days and resulted in no serious injuries -- unlike the events that are portrayed in "Das Experiment," where many of the guards resort to sadistic acts such as punching prisoners, urinating on them and forcing them to wear shirts that have just been used to scrub toilets.

In "Das Experiment," the doctors and professionals overseeing the research project are no less to blame for the blood and guts that spill onto prison floors. They can stop the mayhem they see on the TV monitors, but they decide (against their own guidelines) to ignore it. Bleibtreu's character, who wears special glasses that allow him to record events, could leave the sick conditions he has thrust himself into, but he endures. Others are less fortunate.

Oliver Hirschbiegel's drama, which has aspects of a twisted "reality TV" show, can be seen as a commentary on the Nazism that emerged and overtook Germans 70 years ago. However moviegoers interpret "Das Experiment," the conclusions are raw and uncomfortable. Hirschbiegel has given narrative form to man's inhumanity to man.

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This film contains extreme violence and a sequence of disturbing sexual battery.

-- Jonathan Curiel

'SKINS'
Drama. With Graham Greene and Eric Schweig. Directed by Chris Eyre. (R. 90 minutes. At the Embarcadero, Shattuck in Berkeley and Aquarius in Palo Alto.)

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On a sidewalk bench at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, a middle-aged Lakota named Mogie is getting blotto on Colt 45. He and his buddy, Verdell, are a pair of statistics: victims of an economic gulag with 75 percent unemployment and nine times the national average for death from alcoholism.

But in "Skins," a tough-minded film from American Indian director Chris Eyre ("Smoke Signals"), Mogie isn't a mere poster boy for the American Indian's descending spiral of genocide and neglect. Played by Graham Greene ("Dances With Wolves") in one of the year's best performances, he's a fully dimensional character: pathetic and shrewd, tragic and bitterly funny.

A onetime high-school football hero and honored Vietnam vet, Mogie's become an embarrassment to younger brother Rudy (Eric Schweig), a police investigator on the reservation. It's Mogie who pours beer and flicks cigarette ash on the deer that's roasting on a spit at a police officers' picnic, Mogie who finds escape in a boozy stupor, Mogie who lives in a windblown shack and can't remember his teenage son's birthday.

On the surface, the brothers are opposites -- upright cop versus welfare lush -- but in Jennifer D. Lyne's script, adapted from Adrian C. Louis' novel, they're essentially the same. It's Rudy, enraged by the poverty, alcoholism and spousal abuse he sees on the "res," who becomes a vigilante.

Schweig, so charming as the shy Montana storeowner in "Big Eden," brings a totally different quality to Rudy: haunted, but fiercely resilient and touching in his grief for his brother. Gary Farmer ("Dead Man") is very strong as Mogie's drinking buddy Verdell, but some of the nonprofessional actors in supporting roles have a clumsy quality that disrupts the film's rhythm.

"Secretary" is the tale of a sexually masochistic secretary who finds happiness and release with her mildly sadistic boss. The movie, radiant with self-satisfaction, seems to have been intended as a provocation and as a daring exploration of sexuality. But it gets tripped up on two points: It provokes nothing but yawns, and the sex it explores is stuff everybody knows about and says, "So what?"

He spanks her. She likes it. Hmm. Well, then, maybe it's OK they keep doing it, huh? Maybe these two are meant for each other. That's as deep as "Secretary" goes. It takes a crushingly mundane situation and, with aching slowness, lets it unfold. And, of course, audiences are expected to keep watching because at the start of the movie we see a woman contentedly doing secretarial work with both her hands bound. Maybe audiences really are that easy.

"Secretary" is the disappointing spawn of two excellent writers. It's based on a story from Mary Gaitskill's brilliant collection, "Bad Behavior" (though "Secretary" is probably the weakest story in it), and adapted by playwright Erin Cressida Wilson ("Hurricane"). Alas, what might have been a match made in heaven proves the opposite -- a union of pointless prurience and unlimited sexual fascination.

Director Steven Shainberg adds a smirky touch, filming the story as if it were cute, as though the audience were in on a joke the filmmaker is too hip to state overtly. This effectively torpedoes Wilson's effort to turn "Secretary" into a human story about sexual need. In Shainberg's hands, it's rather a story about two people we're expected to snicker at and then, ultimately, endorse. But endorsing is not the same as caring.

The actors are game. James Spader, as the boss, overacts with Christopher Walken-like abandon, but scales it back when he has to, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, as the self-destructive secretary, is enigmatic and, at moments, sympathetic. Gyllenhaal makes one suspect that Wilson's strategy with the screenplay might actually have succeeded, had Shainberg been willing to invest emotion enough to make a warm movie, rather than attitude enough to make a cool one.

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This film contains untoward language and sexual situations.

-- Mick LaSalle

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